OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Match me if you can: Semi-Supervised Semantic Correspondence Learning with Unpaired Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic correspondence methods have advanced to obtaining high-quality correspondences employing complicated networks, aiming to maximize the model capacity. However, despite the performance improvements, they may remain constrained by the scarcity of training keypoint pairs, a consequence of the limited training images and the sparsity of keypoints. This paper builds on the hypothesis that there is an inherent data-hungry matter in learning semantic correspondences and uncovers the models can be more trained by employing densified training pairs. We demonstrate a simple machine annotator reliably enriches paired key points via machine supervision, requiring neither extra labeled key points nor trainable modules from unlabeled images. Consequently, our models surpass current state-of-the-art models on semantic correspondence learning benchmarks like SPair-71k, PF-PASCAL, and PF-WILLOW and enjoy further robustness on corruption benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/matchme.
FFT: Towards Harmlessness Evaluation and Analysis for LLMs with Factuality, Fairness, Toxicity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread of generative artificial intelligence has heightened concerns about the potential harms posed by AI-generated texts, primarily stemming from factoid, unfair, and toxic content. Previous researchers have invested much effort in assessing the harmlessness of generative language models. However, existing benchmarks are struggling in the era of large language models (LLMs), due to the stronger language generation and instruction following capabilities, as well as wider applications. In this paper, we propose FFT, a new benchmark with 2116 elaborated-designed instances, for LLM harmlessness evaluation with factuality, fairness, and toxicity. To investigate the potential harms of LLMs, we evaluate 9 representative LLMs covering various parameter scales, training stages, and creators. Experiments show that the harmlessness of LLMs is still under-satisfactory, and extensive analysis derives some insightful findings that could inspire future research for harmless LLM research.
Splitwise: Efficient generative LLM inference using phase splitting
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Recent innovations in generative large language models (LLMs) have made their applications and use-cases ubiquitous. This has led to large-scale deployments of these models, using complex, expensive, and power-hungry AI accelerators, most commonly GPUs. These developments make LLM inference efficiency an important challenge. Based on our extensive characterization, we find that there are two main phases during an LLM inference request: a compute-intensive prompt computation, and a memory-intensive token generation, each with distinct latency, throughput, memory, and power characteristics. Despite state-of-the-art batching and scheduling, the token generation phase underutilizes compute resources. Specifically, unlike compute-intensive prompt computation phases, token generation phases do not require the compute capability of the latest GPUs, and can be run with lower power and cost. With Splitwise, we propose splitting the two phases of a LLM inference request on to separate machines. This allows us to use hardware that is well-suited for each phase, and provision resources independently per phase. However, splitting an inference request across machines requires state transfer from the machine running prompt computation over to the machine generating tokens. We implement and optimize this state transfer using the fast back-plane interconnects available in today's GPU clusters. We use the Splitwise technique to design LLM inference clusters using the same or different types of machines for the prompt computation and token generation phases. Our clusters are optimized for three key objectives: throughput, cost, and power. In particular, we show that we can achieve 1.4x higher throughput at 20% lower cost than current designs. Alternatively, we can achieve 2.35x more throughput with the same cost and power budgets.
Minimizing Age of Information with Generate at Will Status Updates and Age-Agnostic Cyclic Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We study the scheduling problem for a multi-source single-server generate-at-will (GAW) status update system with sources having heterogeneous service times and weights, with the goal of minimizing the weighted sum age of information (AoI). In particular, we study \emph{age-agnostic} schedulers which rely only on the first two moments of the source service times and they are relatively easier to implement than their age-aware counterparts which make use of the actual realizations of the service times. In particular, we focus on age-agnostic cyclic schedulers with $O(1)$ runtime complexity where status updates from multiple sources are scheduled according to a fixed finite transmission pattern. We first develop an analytical method to obtain the exact average AoI of each source when a transmission pattern is given. Then, we derive the optimum transmission pattern in closed form for the specific case of two sources. For general number of sources, we propose a novel algorithm, called IS (Insertion Search), for constructing transmission patterns, and we show that IS is capable of producing the optimum pattern for two-source systems, and it outperforms other existing age-agnostic schemes, for the case of more than two sources. Numerical examples are presented to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Geometry-Aware Normalizing Wasserstein Flows for Optimal Causal Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a groundbreaking approach to causal inference by integrating continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) with parametric submodels, enhancing their geometric sensitivity and improving upon traditional Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation (TMLE). Our method employs CNFs to refine TMLE, optimizing the Cramér-Rao bound and transitioning from a predefined distribution $p_0$ to a data-driven distribution $p_1$. We innovate further by embedding Wasserstein gradient flows within Fokker-Planck equations, thus imposing geometric structures that boost the robustness of CNFs, particularly in optimal transport theory. Our approach addresses the disparity between sample and population distributions, a critical factor in parameter estimation bias. We leverage optimal transport and Wasserstein gradient flows to develop causal inference methodologies with minimal variance in finite-sample settings, outperforming traditional methods like TMLE and AIPW. This novel framework, centered on Wasserstein gradient flows, minimizes variance in efficient influence functions under distribution $p_t$. Preliminary experiments showcase our method's superiority, yielding lower mean-squared errors compared to standard flows, thereby demonstrating the potential of geometry-aware normalizing Wasserstein flows in advancing statistical modeling and inference.
Can LLMs Patch Security Issues?
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive proficiency in code generation. Unfortunately, these models share a weakness with their human counterparts: producing code that inadvertently has security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could allow unauthorized attackers to access sensitive data or systems, which is unacceptable for safety-critical applications. In this work, we propose Feedback-Driven Security Patching (FDSP), where LLMs automatically refine generated, vulnerable code. Our approach leverages automatic static code analysis to empower the LLM to generate and implement potential solutions to address vulnerabilities. We address the research communitys needs for safe code generation by introducing a large-scale dataset, PythonSecurityEval, covering the diversity of real-world applications, including databases, websites and operating systems. We empirically validate that FDSP outperforms prior work that uses self-feedback from LLMs by up to 17.6% through our procedure that injects targeted, external feedback. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/Kamel773/LLM-code-refine}
Bergeron: Combating Adversarial Attacks through a Conscience-Based Alignment Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Research into AI alignment has grown considerably since the recent introduction of increasingly capable Large Language Models (LLMs). Unfortunately, modern methods of alignment still fail to fully prevent harmful responses when models are deliberately attacked. Such vulnerabilities can lead to LLMs being manipulated into generating hazardous content: from instructions for creating dangerous materials to inciting violence or endorsing unethical behaviors. To help mitigate this issue, we introduce Bergeron: a framework designed to improve the robustness of LLMs against attacks without any additional parameter fine-tuning. Bergeron is organized into two tiers; with a secondary LLM acting as a guardian to the primary LLM. This framework better safeguards the primary model against incoming attacks while monitoring its output for any harmful content. Empirical analysis reviews that by using Bergeron to complement models with existing alignment training, we can significantly improve the robustness and safety of multiple, commonly used commercial and open-source LLMs. Specifically, we found that models integrated with Bergeron are, on average, nearly seven times more resistant to attacks compared to models without such support.
A Threshold Greedy Algorithm for Noisy Submodular Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We consider the maximization of a submodular objective function $f:2^U\to\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$, where the objective $f$ is not accessed as a value oracle but instead subject to noisy queries. We introduce a versatile adaptive sampling procedure called which determines whether the marginal gain of the function $f$ is approximately above or below an input threshold with high probability in as few noisy samples as possible. Using the sampling procedure as a subroutine, we propose sample efficient algorithms for monotone submodular maximization with cardinality and matroid constraints, as well as unconstrained non-monotone submodular maximization. The proposed algorithms achieve approximation guarantees arbitrarily close to those of the standard value oracle setting. We further provide an experimental evaluation on real instances of submodular maximization and demonstrate the sample efficiency of our proposed algorithm relative to alternative approaches.
Machine Learning for Actionable Warning Identification: A Comprehensive Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Actionable Warning Identification (AWI) plays a crucial role in improving the usability of static code analyzers. With recent advances in Machine Learning (ML), various approaches have been proposed to incorporate ML techniques into AWI. These ML-based AWI approaches, benefiting from ML's strong ability to learn subtle and previously unseen patterns from historical data, have demonstrated superior performance. However, a comprehensive overview of these approaches is missing, which could hinder researchers/practitioners from understanding the current process and discovering potential for future improvement in the ML-based AWI community. In this paper, we systematically review the state-of-the-art ML-based AWI approaches. First, we employ a meticulous survey methodology and gather 51 primary studies from 2000/01/01 to 2023/09/01. Then, we outline the typical ML-based AWI workflow, including warning dataset preparation, preprocessing, AWI model construction, and evaluation stages. In such a workflow, we categorize ML-based AWI approaches based on the warning output format. Besides, we analyze the techniques used in each stage, along with their strengths, weaknesses, and distribution. Finally, we provide practical research directions for future ML-based AWI approaches, focusing on aspects like data improvement (e.g., enhancing the warning labeling strategy) and model exploration (e.g., exploring large language models for AWI).
Forecasting trends in food security with real time data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Early warning systems are an essential tool for effective humanitarian action. Advance warnings on impending disasters facilitate timely and targeted response which help save lives and livelihoods. In this work we present a quantitative methodology to forecast levels of food consumption for 60 consecutive days, at the sub-national level, in four countries: Mali, Nigeria, Syria, and Yemen. The methodology is built on publicly available data from the World Food Programme's global hunger monitoring system which collects, processes, and displays daily updates on key food security metrics, conflict, weather events, and other drivers of food insecurity. In this study we assessed the performance of various models including Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Network, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Reservoir Computing (RC), by comparing their Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) metrics. Our findings highlight Reservoir Computing as a particularly well-suited model in the field of food security given both its notable resistance to over-fitting on limited data samples and its efficient training capabilities. The methodology we introduce establishes the groundwork for a global, data-driven early warning system designed to anticipate and detect food insecurity.
WATonoBus: Field-Tested All-Weather Autonomous Shuttle Technology
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

All-weather autonomous vehicle operation poses significant challenges, encompassing modules from perception and decision-making to path planning and control. The complexity arises from the need to address adverse weather conditions such as rain, snow, and fog across the autonomy stack. Conventional model-based single-module approaches often lack holistic integration with upstream or downstream tasks. We tackle this problem by proposing a multi-module and modular system architecture with considerations for adverse weather across the perception level, through features such as snow covered curb detection, to decision-making and safety monitoring. Through daily weekday service on the WATonoBus platform for almost two years, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is capable of addressing adverse weather conditions and provide valuable insights from edge cases observed during operation.
Permutation Entropy for Signal Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Shannon Entropy is the preeminent tool for measuring the level of uncertainty (and conversely, information content) in a random variable. In the field of communications, entropy can be used to express the information content of given signals (represented as time series) by considering random variables which sample from specified subsequences. In this paper, we will discuss how an entropy variant, the \textit{permutation entropy} can be used to study and classify radio frequency signals in a noisy environment. The permutation entropy is the entropy of the random variable which samples occurrences of permutation patterns from time series given a fixed window length, making it a function of the distribution of permutation patterns. Since the permutation entropy is a function of the relative order of data, it is (global) amplitude agnostic and thus allows for comparison between signals at different scales. This article is intended to describe a permutation patterns approach to a data driven problem in radio frequency communications research, and includes a primer on all non-permutation pattern specific background. An empirical analysis of the methods herein on radio frequency data is included. No prior knowledge of signals analysis is assumed, and permutation pattern specific notation will be included. This article serves as a self-contained introduction to the relationship between permutation patterns, entropy, and signals analysis for studying radio frequency signals and includes results on a classification task.
Eliciting Latent Knowledge from Quirky Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK) aims to find patterns in a capable neural network's activations that robustly track the true state of the world, especially in hard-to-verify cases where the model's output is untrusted. To further ELK research, we introduce 12 datasets and a corresponding suite of "quirky" language models (LMs) that are finetuned to make systematic errors when answering questions if and only if the keyword "Bob" is present in the prompt. We find that, especially in middle layers, linear probes usually report an LM's knowledge independently of what the LM outputs, enabling us to elicit the correct answer despite the model's untruthful output. The best probing method (logistic regression on contrast pairs) recovers 89% of the gap in AUROC between truthful and untruthful contexts, and 75% for questions harder than those used to train the probe. We also find that a mechanistic anomaly detection approach can flag untruthful behavior with 0.95 AUROC. Our results show promise for eliciting reliable knowledge from capable but untrusted models, and facilitates future research empirically investigating ELK methods.
Detection and Analysis of Stress-Related Posts in Reddit Acamedic Communities
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Nowadays, the significance of monitoring stress levels and recognizing early signs of mental illness cannot be overstated. Automatic stress detection in text can proactively help manage stress and protect mental well-being. In today's digital era, social media platforms reflect the psychological well-being and stress levels within various communities. This study focuses on detecting and analyzing stress-related posts in Reddit academic communities. Due to online education and remote work, these communities have become central for academic discussions and support. We classify text as stressed or not using natural language processing and machine learning classifiers, with Dreaddit as our training dataset, which contains labeled data from Reddit. Next, we collect and analyze posts from various academic subreddits. We identified that the most effective individual feature for stress detection is the Bag of Words, paired with the Logistic Regression classifier, achieving a 77.78% accuracy rate and an F1 score of 0.79 on the DReaddit dataset. This combination also performs best in stress detection on human-annotated datasets, with a 72% accuracy rate. Our key findings reveal that posts and comments in professors Reddit communities are the most stressful, compared to other academic levels, including bachelor, graduate, and Ph.D. students. This research contributes to our understanding of the stress levels within academic communities. It can help academic institutions and online communities develop measures and interventions to address this issue effectively.
Investigating the Surrogate Modeling Capabilities of Continuous Time Echo State Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

Continuous Time Echo State Networks (CTESNs) are a promising yet under-explored surrogate modeling technique for dynamical systems, particularly those governed by stiff Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). A key determinant of the generalization accuracy of a CTESN surrogate is the method of projecting the reservoir state to the output. This paper shows that of the two common projection methods (linear and nonlinear), the surrogates developed via the nonlinear projection consistently outperform those developed via the linear method. CTESN surrogates are developed for several challenging benchmark cases governed by stiff ODEs, and for each case, the performance of the linear and nonlinear projections is compared. The results of this paper demonstrate the applicability of CTESNs to a variety of problems while serving as a reference for important algorithmic and hyper-parameter choices for CTESNs
A Survey on Stability of Learning with Limited Labelled Data and its Sensitivity to the Effects of Randomness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Learning with limited labelled data, such as prompting, in-context learning, fine-tuning, meta-learning or few-shot learning, aims to effectively train a model using only a small amount of labelled samples. However, these approaches have been observed to be excessively sensitive to the effects of uncontrolled randomness caused by non-determinism in the training process. The randomness negatively affects the stability of the models, leading to large variances in results across training runs. When such sensitivity is disregarded, it can unintentionally, but unfortunately also intentionally, create an imaginary perception of research progress. Recently, this area started to attract research attention and the number of relevant studies is continuously growing. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of 415 papers addressing the effects of randomness on the stability of learning with limited labelled data. We distinguish between four main tasks addressed in the papers (investigate/evaluate; determine; mitigate; benchmark/compare/report randomness effects), providing findings for each one. Furthermore, we identify and discuss seven challenges and open problems together with possible directions to facilitate further research. The ultimate goal of this survey is to emphasise the importance of this growing research area, which so far has not received an appropriate level of attention, and reveal impactful directions for future research.
A Tight Lower Bound for 3-Coloring Grids in the Online-LOCAL Model
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, \citeauthor*{akbari2021locality}~(ICALP 2023) studied the locality of graph problems in distributed, sequential, dynamic, and online settings from a {unified} point of view. They designed a novel $O(\log n)$-locality deterministic algorithm for proper 3-coloring bipartite graphs in the $\mathsf{Online}$-$\mathsf{LOCAL}$ model. In this work, we establish the optimality of the algorithm by showing a \textit{tight} deterministic $Ω(\log n)$ locality lower bound, which holds even on grids. To complement this result, we have the following additional results: \begin{enumerate} \item We show a higher and {tight} $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ lower bound for 3-coloring toroidal and cylindrical grids. \item Considering the generalization of $3$-coloring bipartite graphs to $(k+1)$-coloring $k$-partite graphs, %where $k \geq 2$ is a constant, we show that the problem also has $O(\log n)$ locality when the input is a $k$-partite graph that admits a \emph{locally inferable unique coloring}. This special class of $k$-partite graphs covers several fundamental graph classes such as $k$-trees and triangular grids. Moreover, for this special class of graphs, we show a {tight} $Ω(\log n)$ locality lower bound. \item For general $k$-partite graphs with $k \geq 3$, we prove that the problem of $(2k-2)$-coloring $k$-partite graphs exhibits a locality of $Ω(n)$ in the $\onlineLOCAL$ model, matching the round complexity of the same problem in the $\LOCAL$ model recently shown by \citeauthor*{coiteux2023no}~(STOC 2024). Consequently, the problem of $(k+1)$-coloring $k$-partite graphs admits a locality lower bound of $Ω(n)$ when $k\geq 3$, contrasting sharply with the $Θ(\log n)$ locality for the case of $k=2$. \end{enumerate}